Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The past Sunday the New York Times had a longish article about those original movies that SyFy Channel churns out for their Saturday nights. The productions aren't going to get critical acclaim, but they do serve a purpose even if I wish they were better. I love monster movies, and disaster movies, and 2nd tier actors and actresses battling CGI creatures, but there's usually always something missing in these movies. They usually take a potentially intriguing concept -- by cheapie monster movie standards -- and somehow suck the life and fun out of it. I'm always a little disappointed with those SyFy original movies.

I have liked a few, though, including S.S. Doomtrooper, a WW II actioner with a band of soldiers battling a huge metallic monster right out of a videogame; Manticore, with Robert

Beltran and Heather O'Donahue as U.S. soldiers in the Middle East battling a huge scaly monster from antiquity, and Monster Ark, with the White Collar's Tim DeKay (he's always great) and Renee O'Connor (Zena's sidekick) in some kind of ancient Biblical adventure, I can't even recall the specifics. There are others that are at sort of fun (Buffy's Nicholas Brendon has appeared in at least one), and that should be key goal of these movies, but they often miss the mark. Plus, the actors are often just plain bad. They need to put at least one real actor in the cast to give the rest of them something to aspire to -- but they often don't.

But SyFy got a good article in Sunday's New York Times, so there.

If you're a SyFy viewer or a television aficionado you'll enjoy the information. Being a former TV Programming person myself, at the very least I respect SyFy for producing movies that aim to entertain an audience, as opposed to the myriad of made-fors that were made at TNT during the '90s that were neither entertaining nor praiseworthy, but hey, at least they were ridiculously expensive. And pretty much completely forgettable, nearly all of them. That's a worse crime than making silly junk that amuses people, I reckon.

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